Things to try in EvoAgent

There are many interesting phenomena that I would like to try in EvoAgent. This is a list of some of them, which will be updated as I come up with new ones. They are mostly based on behaviour of primates.

In this docuemnt I’ll use Female as “the gender the bears the highest cost of reproduction”, and Male as “the other gender”

General phenomena emerging from sexual reproduction and the presence of two asymmetric genders

Males are most focused on finding suitable female partners. Females are interested in finding food. Most of these phenomena should directly emerge from the fact that Female bears a highest cost of reproduction. This seems an extremely important factor as sexual selection if often much stronger than natural selection.

Common Observations:

• Males go where Females are
• Males taking care of their children: what groups? Monogamous relations, multi-female relations etc.
• Parent-offspring conflict
• Some kind of body dismorphism due to competition (sexual dismorphism is mostly observed in non-monogamous groups)
• Sperm competitions
• More generally, some kind of sexual selection for males due to the higher cost of bearing a child for females
• Variation in reproductive success: much higher variation for males than females
• Intersexual selection: favoring traits that indicate good genes, even nonadaptive, traits that increase the fitness of the Female (and more general observation: the Female can be picky)

We need

• Sexual reproduction (with Female bearing most of the cost)

r/K Selection Theory (suggested by “A Wild Boustrophedon”)

See here. This should be working by allowing the agents to decide when to reproduce and how much parental effort give the children. It could create interesting dynamics, and it isn’t very difficult to code

Infanticide

Infanticide is really common in primate. The degree in which this behaviour is spread has been controversial for quite long time, but it seems to be widely accepted now, as far as I can tell Hardy 1977. After the death of an infant, the female stops lactating and starts cycling again.

We Need

• Sexual reproduction (possibly in which one gender bears most of the cost of rising their child - Females and Males)
• Mechanism of killing another agent
• Mechanism for recognizing the kinship of other agents

To consider

• When the infants die, Females should be again able to produce children. Is this necessary? What happens if the interbirth time is not affected at all by the presence of children?
• Infanticidal should only emerge if the killing part can distinguish their children from others
• Infanticide should produce a “friendship” behaviour between females and surrounding males

Contest Competition vs Scrambled Competition

Contest competition happen when the food is clustered in one specific location and can be controlled by a single animal. If the food is scattered around and can’t be monopolized, then it generates “scrambled” competition. For now the environment contains only scramble resources, but most interesting behaviour happen with clustered food.

We Need

• Agents should be able to recognise how far they are from a clustered environmnet. A better visual system seems needed.
• Resources need to be defendable, also ..
• Dominant relations seems to imply some sort of violent competition so a way for the agents to damage each other.

To investigate

• Contest competition generates dominant relations
• Compare Contest compet. environment with scrambled env. in terms of dominant relations.

Living in groups and sociality

Group living is very rare amongst mammals, but it’s much more common for primates. This might be a very complex emerging behaviour so needs more thinking. What favours

To Investigate

What’s driving living in group amongst primate: feeding or predation?